Nothing like the padlock icon showing in your browser window to put your mind at ease, eh? After all, that lock signifies that the site has a Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificate (TLS being the successor to Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL; it’s also referred to as SSL/TLS). The certificate authorities (CAs) that give out...

It was never about the money, said the man who owned Google.com for 1 minute earlier this month. So when Google reached out last week to discuss a reward for its former Display Specialist and Account Strategist/current MBA candidate Sanmay Ved, he responded with pure altruism – telling the company that he’d rather see the...

Nobody’s saying that adblockers cooked up for the newly adblocker-amenable iOS 9 Safari browser were monitoring encrypted traffic, including, say, bank login details or private emails. But they could, given that some of those apps installed root certificates that allowed them to carry out deep packet inspection in order to filter out ads. Given the...

Hopefully you’ve never had anything stolen in a data breach, but if you have I hope you’ve been spared the salted wound of the non-apology. There are notable exceptions of course but as data leaks and network breaches get larger, more common and more damaging, a humble sorry seems to be the hardest word. All too often...

Over the years, users have clamored for a Facebook “Dislike” button. Now, finally, we know how Facebook feels about the request. Facebook Loves it with a big red heart. Or finds it Funny, with squinty-eyed, open-mouthed, laughing mirth. Or Facebook finds the requests Surprising with open-mouthed “Wow!-ness”, or with one-tear-rolling down the cheek Sadness, or...

We might well think we’re properly erasing data from gadgets before we sell them or dump them, but in fact we’re leaving smears of personal data lingering that can lead to identity theft. According to a recent analysis of 122 second-hand mobile phones, flash drives and mechanical hard drives – bought from eBay, Amazon.com and...

Remember Stagefright? It was a security hole, or more accurately a cluster of holes, in Android’s core media-handling library, known as libstagefright. The official name of the buggy library quickly morphed into the media-friendly moniker of the bugs themselves, Stagefright. In operating system terms, a “library” (usually known as a DLL, or dynamic link library,...

You might like Reddit’s filth to be locked in the basement Reddit CEO goes in search of values for the crisis-hit community Reddit bans r/fatpeoplehate, four other subreddits under new harassment rules Reddit to crack down on online harassment About the author John Zorabedian is a blogger, copywriter and editor at Sophos. He has a...

The internet flames scorched Peeple, and now its online presence has at least partially gone up in smoke. For now, anyway. As of Tuesday morning, it was Sayonara to the app’s Twitter account, hasta luego to its Facebook account, and site-not-found for its website. But don’t get your hopes up: this beast isn’t dead yet....

Six years ago, Schuler Benson and Celeste Zendler (now Celeste Benson) had no mutual friends, lived in two different states, had zilch shared Facebook interests, and had never met. But one day, Facebook glitched, and the end result is that the two are now hitched. It’s the “fairy-tale for Millennials,” Schuler Benson says: one random...